Self-help Isn't Helping
I traded self-development for fiction and I've never felt more enlightened
For the first time in nearly 10 years, I bought a fiction book—Dune. Admittedly, I bought it because I’ve been enjoying the movies. The last work of fiction I read was The Hunger Games, which I read, uncoincidentally, because I loved the movies.
I’m ~that~ person.
Sue me.
Until recently, I’ve been of the opinion that reading fiction is a waste of time—there’s so much to learn out there! So much of my life to improve! Why waste time on something that’s not real?!
A fool-hardy position to take but I don’t fault myself for it. I didn’t cultivate a sense of curiosity and a love for learning until my late 20s. I don’t think I read a single book from ages 22-27. After college, I had “good student burnout out”, and I couldn’t stomach the thought of reading for pleasure. I needed a break. But when that break naturally came to an end, my bookshelf rapidly began to fill up (which, side note, I had to buy a bookshelf).
You could say I’ve been making up for lost time.
The book that ended the drought? Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert.
Honestly, I don’t remember any of the wisdom (I assume) from this book. But I do remember feeling floored by the information. I’d never seen or heard anyone talk about the nuances of being a person—I didn’t know that reading a book could make me feel seen.
That wisdom, whatever it was, was the gateway drug that would get me hooked on self-help.
Since then, it’s been a never-ending stream of self-help and self-help-adjacent content: We’ve got the quintessential heavy hitters like The Body Keeps the Score, Atomic Habits, Man’s Search for Meaning, The Creative Act, and the complete works of Ryan Holiday. We’ve got books on life design, making career pivots, minimalism, how to manifest more money, self-sabotage, and how to change your mindset using neuroscience and quantum physics. And of course, as a health and wellness enthusiast, we’ve got books on psychology, hormones, breathing, sleep, and diet. There are a few memoirs sprinkled in there, but even those were used for personal gain.
And I’m not alone. The self-improvement genre is growing at an insane rate and it is projected to be a 14 Billion dollar industry by next year.
Take a look at my bookshelf and you would assume that I must really have my shit together—that I’m the richest, most creative, connected, and most enlightened person that’s ever lived.
LOL
No.
Not even close.
And considering mental health and overall happiness in this country continue to get worse, it’s not working for anyone else either.
No matter how furiously I consumed these books in an attempt to make my life work, I remained the same. Maybe I would pick up a gem or two, or a new way of looking at things, but I was still the same old me with the same problems. In some cases, I started to feel worse—like if I wasn’t able to implement the tools perfectly, then it was a failure on my part—I obviously didn’t do it right.
I’m not saying the self-help genre is a waste of time and that there aren’t books that fall into this category worth reading. I maintain that, while they’re not all winners, the culmination of reading all of these books made me better at my job and helped me change my perspective and understand the world in a new way. It kept the fires of curiosity stoked and while there are very few books that I would consider “life-changing”, as a whole, I’m better off than having not read anything.
But they didn’t “fix” me.
For starters, I wasn’t broken. That’s the fundamental flaw with most self-help. Low self-esteem is the glue that binds the whole genre—you’re not rich enough, fit enough, your job sucks, you suck at making friends, you’ve just been looking at it the wrong way! “Here, this should set you straight”. Then you’re on the self-improvement hamster wheel—the more you learn, the more you realize how deficient you are in so many aspects of life. A little tweak here, a new habit there, and around and around we go.
The problem is, learning about a thing and doing a thing are two completely different things. Reading something on a page does absolutely nothing. You actually have to take action to make any real change. Feverishly consuming self-help might make you feel like things are improving, but in reality, they’re not. This can create a lot of inner conflict—everything you’ve read makes you feel one way, but your reality is playing out in a very different way.
Maddening.
Ultimately, you need to take the leap. Stop using self-improvement as something to hide behind. Something that makes you feel like you’re changing without actually having to do any real work. At some point, you have to cut the chord and trust that you have the tools to figure it out. And if you don’t, guess what? You’ll learn them. You’ll pick them up as you go.
At some point, you need to stop getting ready to live and just…
live.
Which is why I’m picking up a fiction book for the first time in a decade. I don’t know if I’ll like it, because, I’ll be honest, I still really like fiction, but I feel like I need some room to just be, to stoke my innate thoughts and intelligence by letting my imagination do some of the heavy lifting. It’s hard to have any meaningful output when there’s nothing but input.
And maybe it’s cheating by using reading fiction as a roundabout way to improve myself (you can take the girl out of self-development, but you can’t take the self-development out of the girl, am I right?), but it’s something.
Your story brings back bad memories. Over 20 years ago, I went through one of the most difficult periods of my life. I felt terribly alone and abandoned, and my culprit was God.
I blamed him for not loving me, for abandoning me when I was ready to do anything for him. But in return, I received nothing. "Why Eternal? Why is my life so miserable? Why is nothing working in my life? How long will I continue to suffer? Is there any hope for me?".
One day I tore up the Bible, having decided that God didn't exist, and that even if he did, he would be of no use to me. But deep down, I was hoping for a reaction from him that would comfort me.
Years went by, I had my son, I was on the verge of depression and it was then, beset by obsessive thoughts of losing my child, that I realized I needed help. I needed to work on myself. That's how I discovered Mindvaley.com.
The timing was perfect, and it offered exactly what I was looking for to free myself from myself.
I understood, everything was clear now, the problem wasn't God but me. I discovered my true expectations, my unconscious desires and the origin of my suffering.
It freed me in a way you can't imagine. I cried like a baby and every tear contained my deepest pain.
I detached myself from everything that was detrimental to my well-being. I expected God to love me, but in reality I didn't love myself. I expected life to treat me and grant me what I knew I deserved as a child of God, but my thoughts were far too dark. It was up to me to decide and act. God had already given me everything, and instead of using it to transform my life, I kept demanding that he give it to me. Personal development helped me understand that it's not up to God or anyone else to give me what I really want, but it's up to me to create it in my life.
Thank you for allowing me to open up. Continue your quest, you'll get there when you decide to.